‘Must be our lucky day’: Wife scores NC jackpot a decade after husband wins sweepstakes
A North Carolina woman hit the jackpot — continuing a winning streak her husband started a decade earlier.
Marie Magee was shopping at a Publix supermarket in Kill Devil Hills when she had her latest stroke of luck, the N.C. Education Lottery said Tuesday in a news release.
While at the Outer Banks grocery store, officials said Magee decided to play the Carolina Cash 5 game. But when her lottery app revealed the $1 ticket was worth much more, it took time for the good news to sink in.
“I went to the app and it said there was two winners and one was in Kill Devil Hills,” she told the N.C. Education Lottery. “So, I said, “Okay, I’m 99.9% sure I won this.’”
It turns out, her ticket matched enough numbers to split the $536,264 prize in the Feb. 7 drawing, which fell on the same day as the Super Bowl game, officials said.
Magee called her husband to tell him about the prize.
“He thought I was kidding of course,” she said in the news release. “But Super Bowl Sunday must be our lucky day because I think about 10 years ago, he won a La-Z-Boy lounger on Super Bowl Sunday in a football sweepstakes.”
Officials said Magee, who kept $189,704 after taxes, is already planning how she will spend the prize money.
“We’re not retiring but we’re getting close to it,” she said. “We were just gonna pay off some things and use it for investment.”
She’s not the only lottery player whose big win coincided with a major sporting event.
The other half of the jackpot went to an Eastern North Carolina man who bought his ticket early so he wouldn’t miss the UNC-Duke basketball game on Feb. 6, McClatchy News reported. Both he and Magee beat nearly 1-in-a-million odds to win prizes.
